For make benefit of glorious tubes

Posts by Erik Rose

Once a month, web developers from across Mozilla don our VR headsets and connect to our private Minecraft server to work together building giant idols of ourselves for the hoards of cows and pigs we raise to worship as gods. … Continue reading

After months of hard work by talented Mozillians, both paid and volunteer, DXR’s UI overhaul branch has hit production! With more efficient workflows, support for multiple trees, and improvements in discoverability, it makes searching Mozilla’s codebases more fun and takes … Continue reading

DXR, Mozilla’s evolving codebase search engine, has been taking patches at a furious rate these last two months. A great deal of work has gone into a UI refit, still in progress, which will improve discoverability, consistency, and power. Meanwhile, … Continue reading

How do you reason about a codebase the size of Firefox’s? How do you figure out who calls the function you’re messing with, without losing your context in an endless stream of false-positive-infested greps? You bust out DXR, Mozilla’s code search and static analysis tool. Continue reading

Ever wonder just how much you gain by having Apache serve your static files? I had a particularly hairy set of RewriteRules to support this in my project and a fairly simple Python routine as an alternative, so I ran … Continue reading

I have a bit of a dot dependency. As someone who spends a lot of time running tests on his Python code, my mind now self-administers a minute dopamine hit with every dot emitted by my test runner. But nose’s standard test runner has some shortcomings. I’ve written a plugin called nose-progressive that addresses them to make debugging speedier. Continue reading

Having recently come from the Plone world to join Mozilla, I am in the delicious but fleeting position to compare two major Python web frameworks with some pretension of familiarity. Through a series of articles focusing on specific features, I will compare the Zope family of frameworks (as they are used in Plone) with the Django framework, which is gaining popularity at Mozilla and currently runs support.mozilla.com and addons.mozilla.com. Continue reading

Erik Rose coordinates the impact of 108 spring-loaded buttons at Mozilla, venting a byproduct of static analysis, search, and pattern-finding software. His past selves have done realtime fuzzy matching against the corpus of U.S. voters at Votizen, caused the Django community's tests to run in funny orders, written a book about Zope and Plone, and released a bevy of eclectic Python libraries. When not speaking or coding, Erik retreats to his glacier-carved fortress in the wilds of North Carolina, where he discusses formal language theory with his dog, Max.